Here's the basic problem: the reason to support the sale of books is to support authors. You want to incentivize the creation of information, opinion, fantasy, all the ideas that don't exist unless you can convince a creative individual to spend his time making that instead of everything else.

There are a few ways you can get that content in front of someone who wants to consume it.

- You can kill trees, put them in boxes, and ship them everywhere. If they don't sell, it's dead trees that get recycled. If they get resold, the authors get nothing out of that.

- You can send them to libraries. An author gets paid for one book per library.

- You can sell files. Now they're either gonna get copied all around or locked into a proprietary DRM.

On-demand publishing is something individual authors can do. Amazon is the biggest player there. An eBook collective could be done... but the Kindle ecosystem is dominant.

Audiobooks? Audible has become kleenex and it's an Amazon company. So from an individual standpoint if you want to reach customers, you're going to Amazon. From a large company standpoint, you're going to Amazon.

You can want Vimeo to win but that doesn't change the fact that you haven't even browsed there in months. Youtube? You've probably seen a dozen videos today.